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Post by Ted on Oct 22, 2019 9:46:33 GMT -8
How are you Ted? Hope you are well and creating more puzzle books. :-) I'm doing okay. Nurses come every two days to take care of me. Haven't been writing any puzzle books lately as I just don't have the strength to sit and type for any length of time. Hopefully this will change next year.
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chelsfield
SWF Writers
Posts: 700
Joined: Mar 28, 2012 3:07:24 GMT -8
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Post by chelsfield on Oct 22, 2019 23:04:34 GMT -8
Please take care, Ted. Just not the same without you here!
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Post by ChrisLAdams on Oct 23, 2019 7:25:27 GMT -8
How are you Ted? Hope you are well and creating more puzzle books. :-) I'm doing okay. Nurses come every two days to take care of me. Haven't been writing any puzzle books lately as I just don't have the strength to sit and type for any length of time. Hopefully this will change next year. I hope this situation improves soon, Ted. Just keep us apprised when you can.
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Post by djmills on Oct 23, 2019 12:50:01 GMT -8
Ted, glad to hear you are doing OK, if slowly. I will send good healing thoughts your way, to help build up your strength again. Take care.
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Ria Stone
SWF Writers
Posts: 1,055
Joined: Oct 30, 2013 14:12:26 GMT -8
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Post by Ria Stone on Nov 3, 2019 10:24:17 GMT -8
Indies are famously generous with helping others with their projects. I was helped big time many years ago (still am) and on the basis of this I produced a hell of a lot. I continue this tradition of passing on the helping hand as best I can. Lady with childrens book is waiting for a break in our studies to investigate this. On the 20 th, I'll be discussing another woman's biography I could be writing next year. This represents a change in direction for me. We will both be working on the project, me mostly polishing the info into hopefully something readable. In the meantime I'll be painting with one hand and doing sculpture with the other. Looks like 2020 going to be a busy one. But tonight it's a beer and watching t v about master forger van meegeren. Gary, you are very generous and your new project sounds interesting. Hope you will continue posting about your experiences with epubs.
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Post by jaydax on Nov 4, 2019 6:14:55 GMT -8
" Anyone slotted illustrations into text? " Yes - I've produced two books featuring illustrations but these are not children's books. 'Stones, Stars and Solutions' and 'An Illustrated Guide to Getting Published'. The latter book revealed something unexpected. When selling at Amazon I got a higher royalty by choosing their 35% royalty rate than the 70% royalty rate! The problem is that there is a delivery charge for books sold at Amazon using the 70% royalty rate. All those illustrations meant a huge download file size and a high download charge. The 35% royalty rate does not make that download charge. Other retailers don't make this delivery charge so you'll find that a graphics intensive book will make you far more in royalties than at Amazon. Sell the book above at Smashwords and that $2.99 ebook could make you up to $2.54 per copy.
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Post by jjmainor on Nov 10, 2019 3:19:11 GMT -8
" Anyone slotted illustrations into text? " Yes - I've produced two books featuring illustrations but these are not children's books. 'Stones, Stars and Solutions' and 'An Illustrated Guide to Getting Published'. The latter book revealed something unexpected. When selling at Amazon I got a higher royalty by choosing their 35% royalty rate than the 70% royalty rate! The problem is that there is a delivery charge for books sold at Amazon using the 70% royalty rate. All those illustrations meant a huge download file size and a high download charge. The 35% royalty rate does not make that download charge. Other retailers don't make this delivery charge so you'll find that a graphics intensive book will make you far more in royalties than at Amazon. Sell the book above at Smashwords and that $2.99 ebook could make you up to $2.54 per copy. I've been doing graphic-heavy work for about three years now, so I know all about this.
If you go to Smashwords with the book, they have a 10mb limit. If your project is larger than this (my smallest project is about 25mb!), you'll have to hack it into pieces. If you do that, you might end up violating their TOS policy about publishing incomplete books.
You said you're not publishing children's books, so this one might not apply to you. I create my work with Kindle Comic creator which allows you to create panels around the pictures so people can zoom in on their device. I haven't been able to find out how to do this with Calibre (I don't think you can). Recently though, I figured out you can create PDF files in Word which will allow the user to zoom in on a page. It's not the same as Kindle's panel view, but it will work. Still, it gives the reader a different experience.
This one too probably doesn't apply to you since you said your project is a how-to book, but the content restriction on picture books, both with Smashwords and D2D, are absolutely draconian. You can get away with all kinds of sick, twisted sexual situations if it's prose, but heaven help you if you have so much as an image of a straight, married couple in a situation closely resembling sex. Doesn't matter how much is covered, they won't touch it.
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Post by jaydax on Nov 10, 2019 3:52:26 GMT -8
Yet my 'How to...' book has a 13 MB file size and is sitting at Smashwords available to buy (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/766391) I think the discrepancy here is that I converted it to epub format using calibre before uploading it to Smashwords. It may be that Meatgrinder can't handle large file sizes. I know that Amazon's Kindle Create can't do that either. As to calibre not being able to produce Kindle's panel view, that's something I've never had occasion to try but I know that calibre is pretty powerful at the editor level. Can you point me at something cheap produced in Kindle's Comic Creator and I'll investigate. It sounds like a worthy addition to my 'How to...' book's next edition.
So if your book is large with lots of images - convert it to epub format in calibre. Run the calibre bug check on it and in addition put it through an online epubcheck. It will then sail through Smashword's validation process.
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Post by jaydax on Nov 10, 2019 4:00:36 GMT -8
I found this at Smashwords: Should I compress my images? How? Yes. If your images are too high resolution, they will be very large, and can cause the file size of your ebook to balloon. Smashwords supports a maximum files size of 15 megabytes for the Microsoft Word document you upload as your ebook source file. By compressing your images, you'll give your readers a smaller, quicker-to-download file, and it'll also allow your book to incorporate more images if necessary. Although our ebooks support images well, if your images are too high of resolution, such as is common with images originally designed for print production, then the file size will be too large. Print-quality image resolutions are also not supported by e-reading devices. This means the extra quality is unnecessary because it is lost on them. Microsoft Word contains a great image compression feature called "Compress," which you'll find in Microsoft Word versions 2003 and later (though not in Mac Word 2004). The Style Guide's Step 13 shows how to compress your images. Another great option is to download the free program mentioned earlier, Paint.NET at getpaint.net. To compress or resize an image in Paint.NET, open your image in Paint.NET, click "Image," then select 96 pixels per inch to compress. Once the image is compressed, open your manuscript in Microsoft Word and click Insert: Picture: As File.
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chelsfield
SWF Writers
Posts: 700
Joined: Mar 28, 2012 3:07:24 GMT -8
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Post by chelsfield on Nov 11, 2019 0:17:02 GMT -8
I've been doing graphic-heavy work for about three years now, so I know all about this.
If you go to Smashwords with the book, they have a 10mb limit. If your project is larger than this (my smallest project is about 25mb!), you'll have to hack it into pieces. If you do that, you might end up violating their TOS policy about publishing incomplete books.
You said you're not publishing children's books, so this one might not apply to you. I create my work with Kindle Comic creator which allows you to create panels around the pictures so people can zoom in on their device. I haven't been able to find out how to do this with Calibre (I don't think you can). Recently though, I figured out you can create PDF files in Word which will allow the user to zoom in on a page. It's not the same as Kindle's panel view, but it will work. Still, it gives the reader a different experience.
This one too probably doesn't apply to you since you said your project is a how-to book, but the content restriction on picture books, both with Smashwords and D2D, are absolutely draconian. You can get away with all kinds of sick, twisted sexual situations if it's prose, but heaven help you if you have so much as an image of a straight, married couple in a situation closely resembling sex. Doesn't matter how much is covered, they won't touch it.
JJ, i'm interested in your use of the Kindle Comic Creator. Do you hand draw first, or use another software package to create your comics?
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Ria Stone
SWF Writers
Posts: 1,055
Joined: Oct 30, 2013 14:12:26 GMT -8
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Post by Ria Stone on Nov 11, 2019 6:03:46 GMT -8
The uni course is trundling along nicely and I'm becoming part of the furniture. Had a good session on how to use the fancy cameras we can hire and then how to use photoshop. I plan a couple of days taking decent photos of my paintings. I will also be talking to the technical and photography groups with the aim to improve the covers of my books and I shall also be taking photos of a young L G B T(sorry if i missed any letters out) lad in the fine arts group who will pose for a painting of 'Girl with the pearl earring' as a project for me. There is also a creative writing degree course so I'll be touching base with them soon. Also a writing group to say hi to. Also this Sunday I will meet a woman who has had a very interesting life with the possibility of me writing her biography next year. This would be a different writing challenge for me so that could be fun. Other than that, all quiet on the Weston front. That sounds wonderful Gary!!!
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Post by jjmainor on Nov 13, 2019 1:12:05 GMT -8
I've been doing graphic-heavy work for about three years now, so I know all about this.
If you go to Smashwords with the book, they have a 10mb limit. If your project is larger than this (my smallest project is about 25mb!), you'll have to hack it into pieces. If you do that, you might end up violating their TOS policy about publishing incomplete books.
You said you're not publishing children's books, so this one might not apply to you. I create my work with Kindle Comic creator which allows you to create panels around the pictures so people can zoom in on their device. I haven't been able to find out how to do this with Calibre (I don't think you can). Recently though, I figured out you can create PDF files in Word which will allow the user to zoom in on a page. It's not the same as Kindle's panel view, but it will work. Still, it gives the reader a different experience.
This one too probably doesn't apply to you since you said your project is a how-to book, but the content restriction on picture books, both with Smashwords and D2D, are absolutely draconian. You can get away with all kinds of sick, twisted sexual situations if it's prose, but heaven help you if you have so much as an image of a straight, married couple in a situation closely resembling sex. Doesn't matter how much is covered, they won't touch it.
JJ, i'm interested in your use of the Kindle Comic Creator. Do you hand draw first, or use another software package to create your comics? I stage 3-D scenes in Daz Studios and render images from there. It's great, because when I have a sequence of images, I don't have to recreate each panel, I can simply make the needed changes within the scene and render off the next image. The downside is you need a library of the specific models you want to use within the scene. I've been learning to model, so I've also been creating a lot more of the static models that I use.
When I have my pictures, I put them together and add text in Gimp to create the pages. I load the pages into Comic Creator and create "panels." The panels are specified sections of the page a kindle user can zoom in on. Since screens are generally smaller than a print page, I can create panels around the individual images and text bubbles so readers can actually read what a character says. When I'm done, Comic Creator will turn the whole thing into a mobi file I can then upload to Amazon.
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Post by jjmainor on Nov 13, 2019 1:15:39 GMT -8
I found this at Smashwords: Should I compress my images? How? Yes. If your images are too high resolution, they will be very large, and can cause the file size of your ebook to balloon. Smashwords supports a maximum files size of 15 megabytes for the Microsoft Word document you upload as your ebook source file. By compressing your images, you'll give your readers a smaller, quicker-to-download file, and it'll also allow your book to incorporate more images if necessary. Although our ebooks support images well, if your images are too high of resolution, such as is common with images originally designed for print production, then the file size will be too large. Print-quality image resolutions are also not supported by e-reading devices. This means the extra quality is unnecessary because it is lost on them. Microsoft Word contains a great image compression feature called "Compress," which you'll find in Microsoft Word versions 2003 and later (though not in Mac Word 2004). The Style Guide's Step 13 shows how to compress your images. Another great option is to download the free program mentioned earlier, Paint.NET at getpaint.net. To compress or resize an image in Paint.NET, open your image in Paint.NET, click "Image," then select 96 pixels per inch to compress. Once the image is compressed, open your manuscript in Microsoft Word and click Insert: Picture: As File. Ah, I was wrong. The limit is a little larger than I remember. Still, it's something to keep in mind, if, like me, you're using a lot of images that put the project in the 25-75mb range.
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chelsfield
SWF Writers
Posts: 700
Joined: Mar 28, 2012 3:07:24 GMT -8
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Post by chelsfield on Nov 14, 2019 1:00:09 GMT -8
JJ, i'm interested in your use of the Kindle Comic Creator. Do you hand draw first, or use another software package to create your comics? I stage 3-D scenes in Daz Studios and render images from there. It's great, because when I have a sequence of images, I don't have to recreate each panel, I can simply make the needed changes within the scene and render off the next image. The downside is you need a library of the specific models you want to use within the scene. I've been learning to model, so I've also been creating a lot more of the static models that I use.
When I have my pictures, I put them together and add text in Gimp to create the pages. I load the pages into Comic Creator and create "panels." The panels are specified sections of the page a kindle user can zoom in on. Since screens are generally smaller than a print page, I can create panels around the individual images and text bubbles so readers can actually read what a character says. When I'm done, Comic Creator will turn the whole thing into a mobi file I can then upload to Amazon. Wow, 3-d modelling to create a comic is a new one on me! Do you know of any others who use this process? How did you come to it? A lot of questions I know, but I just happen to be researching digital comics at the moment!
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Post by jjmainor on Nov 14, 2019 4:21:42 GMT -8
I stage 3-D scenes in Daz Studios and render images from there. It's great, because when I have a sequence of images, I don't have to recreate each panel, I can simply make the needed changes within the scene and render off the next image. The downside is you need a library of the specific models you want to use within the scene. I've been learning to model, so I've also been creating a lot more of the static models that I use.
When I have my pictures, I put them together and add text in Gimp to create the pages. I load the pages into Comic Creator and create "panels." The panels are specified sections of the page a kindle user can zoom in on. Since screens are generally smaller than a print page, I can create panels around the individual images and text bubbles so readers can actually read what a character says. When I'm done, Comic Creator will turn the whole thing into a mobi file I can then upload to Amazon. Wow, 3-d modelling to create a comic is a new one on me! Do you know of any others who use this process? How did you come to it? A lot of questions I know, but I just happen to be researching digital comics at the moment! I guess a lot of people do it, but maybe they're just putting them up on their sites or DeviantArt or their Patreon pages. Here's a couple threads over on the Daz forums (btw, none of these are mine)
While my comics are done under a pen name I won't admit to, I have created a few of my scifi book covers with DS:
But these were some of my earliest experiments...
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